Workstation virtualisation

With its new ‘POC in a week’ offering, IMSCAD is providing firms that
use CAD and BIM tools with a fast-track virtualisation trial and a
chance to see which GPU technology works best for them.

On-site data centre virtualisation
deployments capable of
streaming 3D CAD to thin clients
are notoriously complex.
With every firm using a different mix of
applications, datasets, workflows and IT
infrastructure, one-size-fits-all solutions
are rare. Proof of Concepts (POCs) often
drag on for months. Some never even get
off the ground, with server hardware left
in cardboard boxes gathering dust.

That’s the experience of Adam Jull,
CEO of graphics virtualisation specialist
IMSCAD, which offers design, engineering
and architecture firms a much easier
way to see if virtualisation can work for
them.

The UK-based consultancy's new ‘POC
in a week’ offering is designed to take the
pain out of getting up and running with
hardware, software and licensing.
Rather than an on-premise install,
firms instead get remote access to a
bespoke, off-site data centre solution that
supports five users on up to five CAD
applications over a five-day period.

IMSCAD advises clients on the type of
deployment – whether they should virtualise
specific applications, for example, or
deliver a fully virtual desktop to users.
Solutions can be built around Citrix or
VMware, Windows 7/8 or Windows 10.

As IMSCAD does not sell graphics or
server hardware, Jull says the company is
in a position to give firms independent
advice on which GPU technologies –
AMD MxGPU, Intel Iris Pro or Nvidia
GRID – are best suited to their workflows,
applications, datasets and user
requirements. After an initial phone consultation,
it will then configure one or
more bespoke POC servers, complete
with software. IMSCAD charges a
$5,000 fee for this service to cover
administration and consultative support.

The company has servers in London
and the USA (both West Coast and East
Coast), so it can serve all of North
America and Europe. It also has a pool of
software licences, including Siemens NX,
Solid Edge, SolidWorks, Catia, Revit,
AutoCAD, Inventor, Civil 3D and other
Autodesk software. Other applications
can be delivered and customers can
install their own as well.

Customers upload their CAD files to the
data centre and then access the 'workstations'
from software clients on PCs, laptops
or tablets, at home or in the office,
over a standard Internet connection.
If bandwidth is poor or latency is high,
WAN acceleration technologies like Citrix
Cloudbridge or Riverbed can be used.
To help users get the most out of the
week, IMSCAD does some hand-holding
along the way and collates empirical
feedback and statistical information.

User experience is assessed through
response sheets, where CAD users give
marks out of ten for specific actions such
as key modelling tasks and model manipulation
(for example, rotate, zoom and pan).

Performance of the environment is
constantly monitored using Goliath software,
to help identify bottlenecks in the
system and give IMSCAD important
information as to how the POC might be
scaled up to support more users.
At the end of the week, IMSCAD goes
through the results and gives advice on
what solutions could potentially work for
each firm. Of course, it can then roll out a
larger-scale deployment on its behalf,
either on site or in the cloud.

Graphics flexibility

Nvidia may be the established leader in
graphics virtualisation with Nvidia
GRID, but Jull believes that both Intel
and AMD can now offer some healthy
competition.

Intel's 'Skylake' Xeon E3-1500 v5 with
Iris Pro graphics P580 is a quad-core
CPU and GPU in one package. This
means that there is no need for an add-in
PCIe Nvidia or AMD GPU. In the data
centre, a server typically has rows of
these processors, each housed on a cartridge-
based chassis, which is essentially
a collection of self-contained mini workstations.

Every CAD user connects directly to
their own workstation, so there is no
need to get into the realms of graphics
virtualisation. This, says Jull, makes configuration
relatively easy.

Nvidia is a great solution but it's
still costly and it's fairly complex
to deploy. Any of the three
solutions pose their own
complexity, but as long as the endto-
end infrastructure is right, your
solution will deliver

IMSCAD - GPUs at a glance

GPU technology

AMD MxGPU

Intel Iris Pro graphics

Nvidia GRID

Typical CAD applications

AutoCAD, Revit, SolidWorks, Siemens NX

AutoCAD, Revit

AutoCAD, Revit, SolidWorks, Siemens NX,
3ds Max, Nvidia Iray

GPU models

AMD FirePro S7150 or FirePro S7150x,

Intel’s ‘Skylake’ Xeon E3-1500 v5 with
Iris Pro graphics P580

Nvidia Tesla M60

Form Factor

PCIe card (single or dual slot)

GPU embedded inside CPU

PCIe card (dual slot)

GPU virtualisation

Hardware

N/A

Software

Virtualisation software
support

VMware vSphere/ESXi 6.x or later, VMware
Horizon 7.x or later
(Citrix support coming in 2017)

"With Intel, you don’t need a hypervisor.
It's a direct bare-metal delivery with
direct XenDesktop/App or Horizon/
View," he explains.
It is possible to 'virtualise' Intel Iris
Pro graphics, breaking up the GPU into
multiple instances. However, this isn't
something he recommends for most
graphical-based applications.

IMSCAD considers the 'Skylake' Intel
Xeon E3-1500 v5 to be a significant step
up from the 'Broadwell' Intel Xeon
E3-1200 v4 with Iris Pro Graphics P6300
that it used in several POCs last year.

Jull says the 'Broadwell' Xeon was a little
underpowered for most graphical
applications, and that it lost out to Nvidia
GRID in several POCs. "Each time it was
close," he says, "but Nvidia GRID won –
graphics [performance] was the key issue
for the actual users."

With the promise of up to 30% more
GPU power, Jull believes ‘Skylake’ Xeon
will be a good fit for CAD and BIM. “I
think Revit/AutoCAD workflows can be
achieved on the Intel solution. Maybe not
Siemens NX and SolidWorks and those
sorts of [graphics-intense] applications
— but certainly the architectural CAD
market,” he says.

AMD made its long-awaited entrance to
graphics virtualisation in September 2015
with the AMD Multiuser GPU (MxGPU),
pitched as the world’s first hardwarebased
virtualised GPU solution.

Simply speaking, it means that the
GPU is built from the ground up for virtualisation,
with all the virtual machine
assignments performed inside the silicon,
rather than inside software, as is the
case with Nvidia GRID.

AMD offers two PCIe add-in boards, the
single-height FirePro S7150 (one GPU)
and dual-height FirePro S7150x2 (two
GPUs). “For an AutoCAD-type workflow,”
Jull says, “AMD can potentially support
up to 32x graphical (CAD) VDIs on a server.
If you’re doing SolidWorks/Catia it
could be down to about eight.” This is
based on there being two double-width
GPUs inside a single server.

Jull explains that, because AMD’s GPUs
are hardware virtualised, there is only one
driver to apply and no software licensing
[Nvidia charges a per-user, per-year
licence for GRID]. This, he says, makes it
slightly easier to deploy and brings down
the total cost of ownership (TCO).

As users have access to a dedicated
hardware resource, performance is also
more predictable. “With Nvidia GRID, it
can be more variable because you are creating
virtual profiles on the GPU,” he says.
The downside of the AMD solution,
according to Jull, is it is not as scalable
and powerful as Nvidia GRID, depending
on the user mix. Because AMD MxGPU
uses hardware virtualisation, GPU
resources are pre-sectioned off and you
can’t go any finer than that.

“With Nvidia GRID – say, in production
after three months – if you find there
is spare capacity on the GPU, you could
add another 16 users by choosing a different
profile.”

Nvidia GRID scalability improved significantly
last year with the introduction
of the Tesla M60, a GPU accelerator that
boasts twice the performance of the previous
generation Nvidia GRID K2 GPU.
With a range of virtual GPU (vGPU)
profiles, the Tesla M60 has the flexibility
to support the widest range of users,
from low end to very high end, and the
highest densities. With a typical Nvidia
GRID server with two GPUs, you could
support around 32x Revit users or 16x
SolidWorks users, Jull reckons.

“The options with Nvidia are vast.
With [the company] adding the new M10
and M6 for blade servers, they really
cover everything from Windows 10 to
Catia,” he says, adding that the Tesla
M60 can even be used for high-end compute,
such as the physically based renderer,
Nvidia Iray.

“Nvidia is a great solution but it’s still
costly and fairly complex to deploy. Any
of the three solutions pose their own
complexities, but as long as the end-toend
infrastructure is right, your solution
will deliver.”

“In the AutoCAD and Revit space – the
architectural space – I think there is definitely
a potential shift towards an AMD
and Intel mix of solution,” he adds.
“Ultimately, you could use all these technologies
for your users at some level.
This just provides a richer and varied
choice of how to centralise your data.”

Conclusion

For a typical POC, bringing technologies
together for an on-site install can be a
lengthy process – and one that is usually
tied to a specific GPU vendor. With this
initiative, IMSCAD is trying to streamline
the process, to give users fast and
valuable experience of working with
their own CAD/design datasets, using
one or more of the three key GPU technologies.

This is all about firms proving the technology
can work for their users. Then, at
the successful conclusion, IMSCAD can
help them understand what is required to
roll out a production environment.
At approximately $5,000 per POC,
firms need to be serious about investing
in workstation virtualisation, but it’s a
small insurance payment that reduces
the risks associated with what is likely to
be a much larger one.